The last question was about where he felt most at home, since he’d grown up in Oklahoma, spent his career covering war in the Middle East, and had just written a book about renovating his family ancestral home in Lebanon[7], due out in March 2012.

“Home is where you want to be, and for me it has to be the family ancestral home in southern Lebanon,” he said. “My wife and I feel, once we’re there, tethered to it. There’s a certain peacefulness when I get there.”

What? How does a war correspondent find time to restore an ancestral home? No one even mentioned the title of the book. I wanted to find it.

I’ve just finished reading it, and throughout, kept remembering the conflict he expressed on NPR about returning to war reporting. He questioned whether he should put himself in those places again, weighing the worth of what he did as a journalist against the risks he took, and “putting too much” on his family by putting war reporting before them.

“House of Stone” is a heartbreaking read. He’d found the house during a break in war reporting, in a little town called Marjayoun, where a half-exploded Israeli rocket had crashed through the second floor. He took a year’s sabbatical from The Washington Post to renovate the home in southern Lebanon. He was recovering from divorce, and it was before he married his second wife and became a father for the second time, so he was learning to live alone, and to heal.

The beautifully written memoir shows a whole new side to the tough war correspondent, evident in how he wrote about his garden: crape myrtle, passionflower, wild tulips, petunias, honeysuckle, rhododendron, jasmine, olive trees and fruit trees.

Sometimes, he wrote, “I found myself spending a lot of time in the garden. Each day, I probably walked around the plants four or five times, watching roses coming out, plums and peaches appearing on trees I had planted only weeks before…There was redemption in silence. Seasons were restorative. A garden, I realized, heals.”

The home was built by his great-grandfather, Isber Samara. After the Ottoman Empire [10]fell, most of Shadid’s relatives—uncles, aunts, grandparents and great-grandparents—went to Oklahoma City, where they formed a tight Lebanese-American community that kept their culture intact.

One of the things he most loved was harvesting olives[11] from two trees planted by his great-grandfathers, which he called “a soothing ritual, full of renewal and healing.” He handpicked the olives[11], thinking that the usual way—beating trees with a stick until olives[11] fell to the ground—was “too aggressive.”

He learned to cure olives from a local expert, first finding the orange, lemon and bay leaves to put in the jar, then “we cut slices of lemon for some, red pepper for others. We would add the olive oil among the rim later.”

His book brims with zest for life, for savoring the present moment, and for all things hand-crafted.